If you’re like me, you no doubt frequently wonder exactly how you could explain the current state of the world to someone who had been, say, in a coma for a hundred years. I don’t personally know anybody in such a state of stasis at the moment, but I run with a pretty scientifically liberal crowd, so, you never know.

Such an explanation, a bringing-up-to-speed if you will, was made no easier by last night’s groundbreaking election of America’s first admittedly black president.

How would one break the news gently, especially if our Mr. Van Winkle’s socio-political leanings were unknown to us (perhaps his chart was lost in the interim)?

Would we start by explaining that for the last eight years, the nation has succumbed to an increasing malaise, suffering an ever-less-popular (and possibly stupid) president, a messy and largely indefensible war, and subsequent economic ruin? That what the country needed most was a man who could give a mothufrecking speech, can I get an amen?

You’d probably have to backtrack a little, explaining the whole “car” thing, the “energy” thing… the “oil” thing. Oil (and probably even killing for it) wasn’t new a hundred years ago, but maybe show him a Hummer and one of those new Dodge hemis and he’d get a clearer idea. I’d be sure to touch upon the military-industrial complex, but just broad strokes, the man’s never even seen a B-52. Or tasted one; now might be a good time to offer him a drink in fact.

Once that grounwork is laid, you could then gingerly hypothesize out loud about a president with ties to both oil and defense contractors, whose idea of fiscal responsibility is ensuring that his supporters don’t have to pay taxes on the increased profits from moving manufacturing overseas. Ahem. Broad strokes, though, we don’t need to alarm the poor man; he’s just getting used to electric light.

Certainly he knows about unpopular presidents, maybe even ones with wigs (history’s not my forte). You could also try drawing a parallel between our dependence on fossil fuels to power our increasingly gadgety lives to morphine use (they had that then, I think). Or absinthe (sp?) And that only foreign labor can produce these electronic items cheaply enough for the average unemployed former factory worker to afford (on credit).

Or just play him Obama’s acceptance speech on youtube (on your phone), cause it was a pip.